Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

The tug pilot fired one of his attitude jets and the pickup swung around until the station was to their right, then he tired another jet and they felt the thrust pushing them sideways toward it. It grew bigger and bigger, one of the huge booms sweeping past only a few hundred feet away, until a tiny black dot became a yawning cavern mouth.

“If I see teeth in there, I’m hitting the bugout button,” Donna said.

“You’re not hooked up,” Trent pointed out.

She gave him the look, but spared him the words.

The tug pilot spun the pickup partway around and corrected their approach, then spun them around the rest of the way and slowed them down so they drifted into the docking bay at just a few feet per second. It was an oddly shaped chamber, almost rectangular but with walls that bulged inward in the middle. Glowing circles in the walls provided illumination when the door irised closed behind them, then air rushed in to fill the vacuum and the walls straightened out.

The tug pilot reoriented the pickup so its wheels were near one of the walls, then reached out with two arms and gripped protruding knobs in the adjacent wall, holding the pickup in place. “It’s safe to exit,” he said.

Trent popped his door latches, but the door wouldn’t budge. There was more pressure outside than in. He opened the valve in his door and it hissed for a few seconds, and then he was able to open the door.

The air was warm, and rich with the smells of life. Not unpleasantly so, but you could tell that people—and lots of other creatures, too—lived here. Trent and Donna pushed themselves out of the cab and gripped the sides of the pickup to keep from drifting away, and their tug pilot popped open his control bubble and flew out to hover next to his craft. Without the radio, Trent wasn’t sure how to communicate with him, but a voice spoke from the side of the tugboat: “These mobile transceivers will allow you to hear us, and we you. They also allow us to function as translators for beings who don’t speak English. Please take one and strap it to a convenient body part.”

Trent heard Donna trying to suppress a giggle. He just smiled and said, “Okay.” There were four little gray boxes about the size of matchbooks clipped to the framework next to the alien; he pulled loose two of them and reached across the top of the truck to hand one to Donna. The strap was an inch-wide piece of black nylon long enough to go around his thigh if he’d wanted to put it there, but he decided on his upper arm instead.

“How’s that?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” the speaker replied. The butterfly flapped its wings and the speaker said, “If you will follow me, then, I’ll give you the tour.”

Trent and Donna pulled themselves around to the front of the pickup and were about to push off after the butterfly when a slit in the docking bay’s inner wall spread apart and Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher floated through.

“Trent! Donna!” Judy yelled, and she launched herself toward them, her arms held out wide.

Judy was a medium-tall, dark-haired woman with a big smile. She wore a blue coverall and brown socks with individual toes in them so she could use her feet as well as her hands to grip things. Trent got a good look at the socks on their way past as Judy tumbled in the air and landed feet-first against the windshield of the pickup, leaving her in perfect position to wrap her arms around Trent and Donna’s waists and give them both a big sideways hug.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Doing okay,” Trent said automatically.

“Better now than we were, that’s for sure,” Donna added.

Allen was tall and blonde and wore the same smile and the same basic clothes as Judy, only his coveralls were bulging with pockets full of science-geek equipment. “Hey,” he said, hanging onto the doorframe.

“Hey yourself,” Trent said.

“So what brings you here?” Judy asked.

“Long story,” Trent replied.

“It’s the United States problem,” the speaker on Trent’s arm said, and it took him a second to realize that it was the tug pilot—presumably just a different extension of the same Potikik they had talked to earlier—who had spoken.

Judy shook her head, and her short black hair flipped from side to side. “Oh, man. What isn’t?” she said. “What did they do this time?”

“Dropped a meteor on us, for one thing,” Trent said.

“What for?”

“Visiting a French colony.”

“Oh. Well. They are at war, you know. At least the Americans think so.”

“But these were civilians. The U.S. is bombing civilians.”

“That’s not surprising. They’ve been doing that in other countries for decades.” Judy straightened up and said, “Come on, let’s show you around a little, and then we can meet up with some of the other Federation delegates and you can tell us what happened.”

She pushed off toward the doorway, carrying Trent and Donna with her, and Allen caught them when they got there. The corridor behind him was smaller, just the right size for two people to move through side-by-side and let each be able to touch a wall. It was oval in cross section and had a rough surface, like tree bark, with lots of knobs sticking out for gripping. Doors opened off either side at irregular intervals; marked only by the seam where the two sides would pull apart when you pressed their edges. They did that to a few. Some of the chambers behind the doors were huge; several had big windows looking out into space, with sunlight streaming in on green parks and lush gardens.

“This was all just waiting here, empty?” Trent asked. “Along with maybe a million more of them?”

“Yep,” said Allen. “And to answer your next question, no, we don’t know who designed ’em. Near as we can tell, they died out or just packed up and left over a million years ago. None of the original stations have survived that long, as far as we know, so we haven’t found any artifacts, other than the stations themselves. That tells us plenty, though. For instance, they were about our size, breathed air, lived in groups, liked open areas with lots of light, and came and went in spaceships.”

“And they thought big,” Donna said.

“That, too.”

They came to a door that opened into the biggest chamber they’d seen yet, a bubble at least five hundred feet across with three big skylights that poured sunlight into a spherical park filled with trees and bushes and flowers. Dozens of unfamiliar animals floated among the vegetation, some browsing on it, others just hanging onto it for support, and after a minute Trent realized that most of them were engaged in conversation. These were aliens.

“Let’s introduce you around,” Judy said, leading them into the park. “These aren’t all of our delegates, not by a long shot, but they’re enough to start with.”

Even so, there were more names and body types than Trent could remember. The reptilian guy with the big yellow gills was Kasak, and the fuzzy snowball with the sticks for arms was Menaripal, but the others went by too fast for him to do more than nod and say, “Pleased to meet you.” Most of them didn’t speak English, but when they used their own language, the speakers on Trent’s and Donna’s arms would translate, using different voices for each.

Judy led them all to a sunny patch of bushes where they could nestle in and not drift around while they talked, and she had Trent and Donna tell everyone what had happened to them. When they got to the bit about going 20,000 light-years too far, and figuring out how to get back only to have the program do it again when they tried to jump to Federation headquarters, Allen said, “That doesn’t sound possible if they’re using the control software I wrote for the core code. Can I have a look at that program?”